You don't go to McDonald's for a rocket salad

Its retro, all-American trash quotient was an integral part of its appeal - especially in Europe

Now I am every bit as adept at taking the high moral and nutritional ground about fast-food as the next person. If you are of a certain age and have no children in tow, you can afford to scorn the Big Mac and fries even as you unwrap your supermarket Thai green curry chicken for the microwave. But I have to admit that once or twice a year (all right, four or five times), I am partial to a milkshake, and when you are talking milkshakes – not smoothies, flurries or any other new-fangled mutation – McDonald's produces a very acceptable version.

Which is why you could have found me last week in a strangely queue-free McDonald's, sipping a vanilla milkshake through a straw. But it was not just the lack of queues that made this a bizarre McDonald's experience. As I twirled the paper cup, it suddenly struck me: they must have changed suppliers. Where was the gaudy red and yellow, where were the golden arches? The cup was patterned in soft, eco-friendly shades of green, yellow and white. Neither words nor design betrayed any hint of McDonald's. Instead of the golden arches, there were the words "Ever changing new tastes".

So this was what the public relations people had been talking about these last few months. Here, drawn on a paper cup, was the new culturally sensitive, less brazenly American, less globally recognisable McDonald's. After suffering its first loss in its history, facing a lawsuit in the US from fast-food "addicts" and becoming a favoured target for anti-Americanism in all its forms, McDonald's is trying to change its image.

The paper cups are the least of it. McDonald's now means healthy salads and bite-sized fruit, alongside the burgers and nuggets; and alongside the sugared soda drinks there will be a range of fruit juices. I even noticed something called a "McCafe" the other day. No wonder its new motto is "ever changing new tastes".

Far be it from me to suggest that the PR experts, still less the mighty McDonald's, are mistaken, but I can't help feeling that the company has drawn an unnecessarily drastic conclusion from its troubles. The appeal of McDonald's, and the way it made its name, was its predictability.

McDonald's was a place where you knew the options before you went in; that is why you went there. You went to buy a burger in a sesame-seed bun with fries (some of the best in the business). You washed it down with a fizzy drink and added a hot fruit pie, perhaps even a milkshake, for fun, and you hardly had to wait. Not least, you went to McDonald's because of its reputation for hygiene; clean floors, clean tables and – no mean achievement this, in what was for much of rural America essentially a road-house – clean loos.

For years, McDonald's earned its reputation. Competitors came and went, all with their own unique selling points. But McDonald's was the most consistent. For Americans, there was the added feel-good factor: the teenagers paying for their first car or working their way through college by "flipping burgers"; the colour-blind recruitment, the prospects for promotion and management training, Ronald McDonald's charitable endeavours.

Anyone who has patronised McDonald's in the US in recent years could tell you exactly what was wrong. I encountered branches where the milkshake machine was not working and no one apologised or even seemed concerned to repair it. People were waiting five minutes or more for a Big Mac and fries while the staff squabbled and got in each other's way. The floors were not swept, and the loos ... well, better not mention the loos.

But perhaps the decline really set in when the noble calling of "burger-flipping" somehow turned into a term of abuse – the holiday job that no decent student with any other option should ever accept.

These were shortcomings that could have been remedied without messing around with the menu. Its retro, all-American trash quotient was an integral part of its appeal, especially in Europe. The more McDonald's offers us healthy-eating and dishes tailored to our supposed national preferences, the more we will be driven to look elsewhere for our burgers and shakes. You don't go to McDonald's for a pizza, cappuccino, or watercress and rocket salad. You go for a break from all that.

Explaining the new strategy, the company's chief executive said: "The world has changed, our customers have changed; we have to change, too." But have we, or the world, really changed that much? The pity is that so many once successful companies interpret a dip in their fortunes as evidence that they need to change the whole basis of their operations, rather than as a warning that their standards have slipped. My requirements – and, I suspect, those of many others – are modest: clean loos and a competent milkshake – fast. We can get the dim sum and the rest elsewhere.

m.dejevsky@independent.co.uk